No chess book, I think, can be complete without paying homage to Master Bird.
If I had only one page to rejoice in, it should own a kindly veneration for all
his adventures and misadventures, his farce and comedy and drama of the
chessboard. The roots of his play were sunk deep in the tradition of
Labourdonnais and MacDonnell; he played Morphy; and half a lifetime afterward we
see him at Hastings, playing a thoroughbred game which Pillsbury said was too
beautiful to annotate! A long stretch, that - and a brimful of
enthusiasm. He adored chess, i.e., the play itself, which is not common among
masters.

Bird earned the rebuke of playing impulsively in tournaments. It was
disrespectful and scandalous, some thought; but if there is genius in chess,
Bird, of all players, had it, I believe, in greatest abundance. And his speed
and sparkle and eccentricity must have interested Morphy himself, to the degree
that he took down some of Bird's games. That's a thought worth more than a stone
monument. I like the picture of Morphy, paper and pencil in hand, recording the
Bird maneuvers.

I saw Bird once at Simpson's Divan, but not to speak to. I brought away an
impression of fulminating chess, of hearty laughter, and liberty and beefsteak.
He romped!

Once I asked Teichmann what he thought of Bird's chess. "Same as
his health," he replied; "always alternating between being dangerously ill and
dangerously well."

England will not know his like again.

This is the game
which, as clerk of the evening, Paul Morphy "took down" in 1859.